About This Quiz

Think you have a gargantuan vocabulary? The English language has one of the largest vocabularies of any language, due to its diverse roots. English is made up of Germanic languages, Romance languages and Greek at its roots, combining all of them for a monstrous number of words. English is also unique from other languages because the British carried it with them all over the world. In every place English went, it took on ever more words, making it a truly global mishmash of wondrous and wacky words.

English has over a million words, and many experts think it has the largest vocabulary on earth, even though this is hard to prove. This is because in spoken languages some words become obsolete or are forgotten or change, while new ones are invented all the time. Many words have stayed the same, but their meanings have changed over the centuries. English is unusually suited to this. In fact, over 1,700 of our common daily words were invented by William Shakespeare. These include words like "assassination" and "eyeball."

If you are an English language expert with an impressively Brobdingnagian vocabulary, put your language savvy to the ultimate test with this arduous quiz!